Hong Kong Paper Drops Pro-Democracy Column

The hedge fund manager Edward C.K. Chin, with microphone, and Benny Tai, co-founder of the Occupy Central movement, addressed the news media at a protest outside government offices in Hong Kong on Friday.

Alex Ogle / Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

September 2, 2014

HONG KONG — A Hong Kong hedge fund manager who rallied support from bankers and brokers for the city’s pro-democracy movement said Tuesday that a leading business newspaper had dropped his long-running column.

The hedge fund manager, Edward C. K. Chin, revealed the decision by The Hong Kong Economic Journal two days after the Chinese government roundly rejected the movement’s demands. He and his supporters said the action was the latest blow to Hong Kong’s beleaguered media freedoms, a criticism the paper rejected. The dispute was another sign of raw tempers in Hong Kong, where politics, business and the news media have increasingly felt the gravitational pull of Beijing.

Mr. Chin has been one of the financial sector’s prominent supporters of the movement, Occupy Central With Love and Peace. The group said Sunday that it would stage peaceful protests in Central, the financial heart of Hong Kong, after China proposed electoral changes for the city that would doom activists’ demands for democracy.

Mr. Chin had used his weekly column in The Economic Journal, a Chinese-language broadsheet read by bankers and investors, to push for full-fledged democracy and to criticize China’s handling of Hong Kong.

He said he was informed by email over the weekend that the paper would stop using his column, which he wrote for more than eight years, as part of a redesign of the business section, in which it appeared. He rejected that explanation and said that pressure from China, possibly indirect, appeared to lie behind his dismissal. “It’s a political decision,” he said Tuesday.

The Economic Journal denied that the move was politically motivated. “We respect the columnist’s freedom of expression, but media also have room for editorial autonomy,” a Journal spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

The statement said the decision to remove Mr. Chin’s column was part of an editorial redesign planned over two months that also affected other columnists. “This is something that papers do all the time,” it said.

The Economic Journal is owned by an offshore trust established by Richard Li, a Hong Kong businessman. Mr. Li is the son of the city’s, and Asia’s, richest man, Li Ka-shing, who has extensive investments in China.

Since returning to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong, a former British colony, has existed under a “one country, two systems” arrangement that preserves its independent legal system and freedoms unavailable in mainland China.

But that arrangement has come under increasing pressure from the mainland’s economic and political influence, and many journalists have said that the city’s news outlets are especially vulnerable to that influence.

In February, a former chief editor of Ming Pao, a respected Chinese-language newspaper with a tradition of independence, suffered grievous injuries in a cleaver attack. The police have yet to provide an explanation for the attack, although suspects have been arrested. Last week, officers from Hong Kong’s anticorruption agency searched the home of Jimmy Lai, a combative media magnate who has long supported the democracy movement.

Members of the British Parliament are preparing to hold hearings about Hong Kong, including the electoral changes and the “one country, two systems” arrangement, which derives from a treaty reached between Britain and China in 1984.

On Tuesday, Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a regular news conference in Beijing that Chinese officials had raised objections. Hong Kong is “China’s internal affair, and no interference by external forces will be tolerated,” Mr. Qin said.

The Independent Commentators Association, a Hong Kong group that advocates media freedom and diversity, said The Economic Journal could not escape suspicion that political pressure from the mainland authorities and their Hong Kong allies had influenced its decision.

“We won’t speculate on The Economic Journal’s motives for its remake,” the association said in a statement. “But the objective fact is that The Economic Journal has, proportionally speaking, lost the columns of someone who supports the views of Occupy Central.”

Mr. Chin said he and other Occupy Central supporters from the financial sector would consider setting up an independent news outlet, perhaps a website, that would “make another Economic Journal.”

The dropping of Mr. Chin’s column comes as Occupy Central tries to sustain public commitment to its protest plans, while also trying to shift focus from the failed demands for electoral democracy to broader, long-term hopes of preserving Hong Kong’s freedoms and civil society.

“Democratic reform in terms of elections, in terms of a change in the system, may not be possible in the coming eight to 10 years,” Chan Kin-man, an associate professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a co-founder of Occupy Central, said Tuesday. “That’s why we need to create a resistance movement that can protect our core values.”